NEW YORK — An Academy Award contender that no one's sure how to pronounce?

"Babel" has seven Oscar nominations, meaning the name of the film will be read at least seven times Sunday night. But its pronunciation has stumped even its biggest star.

"Thank you for honoring our film 'Babble.' Or 'BAY-bel' or 'Bah-BELL,' " Brad Pitt said after the film received an earlier award at a film festival in Palm Springs, Calif. "We're still arguing how to pronounce it."

The uncertainty over the title is fitting, since the movie percolates with cultural confusion. It takes place over three continents in four different languages, five if you count sign language.

Robin C. Barr, the linguist-in-residence at American University in Washington, studies the phenomenon called folk etymology — speakers' incorrect reinterpretations of, and anecdotes about, words — and notes that the name of the city first pops up in the texts of Sargon, an Akkadian king about 2300 B.C.

Which leaves us, oh, about 4,300 years for those reinterpretations and anecdotes to develop.

Such as the Tower of Babel story in Chapter 11 of the Bible's Book of Genesis. It tells of how, when humans all spoke the same language, they determined to build a tower up to heaven. Alarmed, God ended the project by confusing their language: They couldn't understand each other and couldn't work together anymore.

"The ancient storyteller of Genesis 11 is using the name in a satirical word play in the story," says Wayne T. Pitard, a religion professor at the University of Illinois.

Both Barr and Pitard offer that the word is actually a form of the name of the city of Babylon, and it has nothing to do with the Hebrew verb balal (confuse) in the Bible; it derives from the Mesopotamian Akkadian language and means "gate of the gods." The longer form of the ancient word bab ilani, (hence, Babylon) is an alternative form that means the same thing.

Barr says the English word babble is not at all related etymologically to the Hebrew/Akkadian Babel.

It's onomatopoeic, like boo or hiss. "There are words for babble in many languages that have arisen independently via the imitation of children's speech or other unintelligible language," Barr says. She adds that the ancient Greek word for barbarian originally simply meant anyone who didn't speak Greek — "their language sounded like 'bar-bar-bar-bar' to the Greeks, apparently."

The Middle English babelen (source of our word babble) is unrelated, but is also imitative of child language or flowing water (the common "babbling brook"), she says. And the Sanskrit balbala means stammer.

But before we all get tongue-tied, Barr avers that none of the pronunciations can be held up as the sole "correct" one.

And, really, does it matter?